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Month: August 2017

Published on Leave a comment on March 2018 (8 months away…)

Raspberry Foundation had  a quick temper to announce the date of 8 months away. But, easy, it must come faster than we are expecting. This is about a big birthday party for Raspberry Pi on the first weekend of March 2018.

Hey, we should do something, big one! The date has fixed. Please save the date, on Sunday, 4th of March 2018.

 

On 2012, Raspberry Pi was born and turns into six next year.  5th birthday party was pretty big and they seem decided to make it bigger and globally next year! and I believe that's why they made such an early announcement.  They call user events as Raspberry Jam and are willing to make the movement spread worldwide.

(I joined the Raspberry Jam Slack team and have learned over 100 was showing interest to have local events.)

I will make the Raspberry Jam in Hamamatsu including Scratch Day and micro:bit gathering. Calling Kids in my classes and their family and it will be like 300 of people will join. Show & tell and kiosks by kids will be available.

The venue is tentative.  Please save the date and expect further details.

 

Published on Leave a comment on Congratulations on Scratch website/community with 20mil registered users!!

On 2017-8-12, finally, 20million users. It's about registered users with Scratch website/community. Congratulations!!
It went more than 10 million users on February last year, and has been growing by 500 to 600 thousands a month,  then it's twice now. Increasing by 10 to 20 thousands a day, amazing, isn't it?  (Scratch Statistics)

You can code on Scratch by just snapping blocks. It's too simple to start coding on Scratch 2.0 if you visit the site. You can even use cloud storage to hold your projects with your account registered.  Yes, many users are using it without their accounts.  We have to say "it's at least 20 million" because there are still many Scratch 1.4 users, too.

It is often said that Scratch is for young kids by its look and feel, but don't judge a book by its cover.  I believe it has good feel and sense as a programming language. Scratch team says "low floors, high ceilings, and wide walls". You can deeply learn from entry to basic level enough.  The huge community has been formed from age 4 to 80 with the peak at 2.10 mil of age 12, 1.92 mil of age 11, and 1.89 mil of age 13.

Interesting article by Dr. John Umekubo:

Low Floors, High Ceilings, and Wide Walls

We can name many reasons why Scratch is good for entry level learners, the community is obviously the big one. Wide range of ages group of 20 million registered users and growing rapidly, 24 million shared projects, and 123 million comments on projects.

Talking about Japan, I'm asking kids in my classes, "Now it has this many users at the website, guess how many Japanese there are."  It can be a very good quiz actually, it's too low in number.  The answer had been always "it's less than 1%, let's get on board!" for a long time.

Congratulations!!  Just got to the 1%!  We have a TV program named "Why!? Programming" for one year and a half,  and I believe it is a great booster.

I always say to my class "if you make it in English, your audience will be increased by 100 times."  Hey, let's get on board first!